Wednesday, 12 June 2013

Killing ERT to Save It

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
Today the Samaras government, in the person of the government spokesman, Simos
Kedikoglou, announced the closure of ERT, the Greek public broadcaster.

The announcement was apparently made today, and
called for the immediate closure by the end of the working day. By evening, ERT
was off the air.

The ostensible reasons for the closure
include high staffing (nearly 3,000 staff), high costs (a budget of
EUR 300,000,000), and accusations of waste, corruption and nepotism. All these
issues are true.

Mr. Kedikoglou promised that 1,000 of the
terminated 3,000 staff would be re-hired “using transparent procedures” via the
ASEP civil service recruitment mechanism. And that a “New ERT” would be launched
“in the near future”.

It is
hard to think of a more absurd way of dealing with things. Although I have
written about the need to reform ERT (see my post Neither
PASOK nor ND have a plan to reform the public sector in Greece from Monday,
September 14, 2009), the present means of doing so reflects such a lack of
political maturity, or indeed sanity, that it becomes difficult to see how this
government plans to handle any more serious issues.

·Successive political
administrations have influenced how ERT reports news, including New Democracy
and PASOK. Do we really believe the “New ERT”, set up amid conditions of brutal
poverty, will be any different?

·The government has not announced
any convincing plan for the structure and operations of the “New ERT” – because
it doesn’t have one.

·The government has announced that
the “New ERT” will no longer benefit from a mandatory tax, but has not outlined
how it will be financed. Since public finance is almost inevitable (private
advertising in a depression is not sufficient to maintain 1,000 public sector
staff), we can be sure that some form of tax spending will be needed for the
“New ERT”. So once again, the public will pay. Skai reports that according to Mr. Kedikoglou, the cost of the "New ERT" will be EUR 200,000,000 per year.

·The government cannot give any
assurances that the hiring of 1,000 staff for the “new ERT” will not be done
using the same lack of transparency and the same nepotistic practises that have
gone on before. (Unless we suddenly believe that ASEP has become a transparent
organisation, in the face of 30+ years of political history).

·The silence on the wider issue of
the objectivity in news broadcasting, and the twisted links between
construction oligarchs and media channels, is deafening. Yet you cannot
possibly discuss the role of an independent public broadcaster without
addressing the issue of political influence over other new channels by very
wealthy oligarchs who have a disproportionate share of public sector
construction projects.

·This “decapitation” of a
semi-governmental enterprise is a brilliant way of distracting from the near total
failure of the government’s privatisation programme and fiscal policy.

What is
even more worrying is that ERT is now off the air, and the staff are terminated
(and will receive compensation), but the government has yet to even begin
drafting the law that will give rise to the “New ERT”. This means that there
will be a delay of several months before this reaches the Parliament floor.

Along the
way, it will be twisted, deformed and lobbied to reflect the special interests
necessary to make it work. It will distract the government from the vital effort
needed to restructure the economy (not that it is working particularly hard in
this direction either). And it will result in thousands of hours of cheap and
empty political “debate” (not that there was any shortage of this already).

The
legislative and operating framework of such a broadcaster requires real thought
in order for it to function properly. I doubt any such quality of thought or
planning will be manifest in the current government.

This
looks like yet another hasty, spasmodic action that will only undermine
whatever little trust the public has in even the well-meaning [sic] efforts of
its government. At the other end of the spectrum, it will give rise to further
self-censorship and fear among the civil service, while strengthening the role
of external media barons. It will ultimately weaken the present government still further.

As much
as I would love to see a more efficient public sector in Greece, and a less
expensive one, there are better ways of doing this. The present decision is
absurd, if not criminal.

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